Memoirists From The United States

"I love Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior-what a wonderful book that was for me. That gave me permission to keep going with what I'd started with House on Mango Street."

"For fiction, we fantasize about what we would like to happen: I am making what I would like to happen happen. And so, this writing always feels new and going forward. If there is such a thing as reverse memory, maybe that's what I am getting into; because it seems to me, I'm writing the memory of the future rather than a memory of the past. (1986)"

"Growing up as I did as a kid, I don't see how I could not have been a feminist. In Chinese culture, people always talk about how girls are bad. When you hear that, right away it makes you radical like anything. (1977)"

"When I read Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir, The Woman Warrior, it struck me with particular force because of the warrior fantasies I had had in my childhood... At the heart of her drama is the tension between fantasy and insanity, balanced with exquisite skill."

"(about visiting China for the first time) MHK: I did feel that I was going back to a place that I had never been. (1986)"

"Asian American writers like Maxine Hong Kingston are aware of that too: that you can think in another language and borrow from its sensibility, from its syntax and idiomatic phrasing to add something new to the English language"

"The power of imagination leads us to what's real... it's a bridge toward reality. (1986)"

"I had no expectations. I thought, “If I don’t make it, it’s my own fault.” In China I had to suffer and labour for the Communist Party – here I was given the opportunity to suffer and labour for myself and to build my own life. I chose to look at the glass half full – I think that’s a very immigrant attitude."

"I've heard people say, "Why don't you write about rich, successful Chinese American people? Why don't you write real role models?" I think I do write about the great emotional, psychological struggles. I'm not that interested in writing Horatio Alger stories. I think of myself as somebody who's been given a gift of an amazing literary voice, and so I want to be the voice of the voiceless. I'm not that interested in being the voice of a wealthy, corporate Chinese American executive. (1990)"

"I feel that I break through pigeonholes of what's fiction and what's nonfiction, of what an autobiography is. (1990)"

"One of the first things I ever noticed and loved about reading is that words can get through all kinds of barriers; they can get through skin color and culture. It's so easy to read and go through all kinds of struggles with an author. I love the way, when we read, we actually take on the mind of the person that we're reading. (1990)"

"I've heard that before, from writers who say that I get them going again. It makes me feel that in my life I am at the source of life and words. I feel that I'm sort of standing over this hole in the universe, and it's all pouring in. I can be a conduit. The people who read my work feel more alive, and they can work. I feel like that about other writers that make me keep going. When I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando or William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, I can feel like I'm dying, or I'm stuck, both in life and in work. I read those books, and then I start flowing again. I'm happy that I can do that for other people. (1989)"

"what I want is to give people questions (which I think are very creative things) and then when people wrestle with them and struggle with them in their own minds and in their own lives, all kinds of exciting things happen to them. I don't want people to throw the responsibility back to me. (1990)"

"There's a redemption that takes place in art (1990)"

"It's always important to tell the truth because if you don't, there are all kinds of terrible social and psychological consequences. There are implosions and crazinesses that take place when you keep important energies and forces locked up inside of yourself. I think that some of our truths are things that are not dealt with in standard autobiography. I think that dreams are very important to women-and important to everybody's psyche-and to have access to those dreams is a great power. Also visions that we have about what we might do, also prayers-that's another "silent, secret" kind of thing. I think part of what we have to do is figure out a new kind of autobiography that can tell the truth about dreams and visions and prayers. I find that absolutely necessary for our mental and political health. I think the standard autobiography is about exterior things, like when you were born and what you participate in-big historical events that you publicly participate in-and those kinds of autobiographies ignore the rich, personal inner life. I feel that it's a mission for me to invent a new autobiographical form that truly tells the inner life of women, and I do think it's especially important for minority people, because we're always on the brink of disappearing. (1990)"

"When you are a person who comes from a multicultural background it just means that you have more information coming in from the universe. And it's your task to figure out how it all integrates, figure out its order and its beauty. It's a harder, longer struggle. (1989)"

"These struggles have got to result in happy endings for all, and the readers must learn not to worship tragedy as the highest art any more. (1990)"

"I travel a lot, and I know that I communicate very well in person, on one to one, but the books say things in a better way than I can get verbally, and also it works so efficiently, with those books getting out all over the world. (1990)"

"I think that feminist writers have been writing with power and pride, but I am suggesting that we have to invent new images and ways of power. So far the world thinks of power as violence, that power comes from a gun. We must create a new kind of drama in which there is drama, but it's nonviolent. And this has barely been thought of. (1990)"

"One of the things he (Thích Nhất Hạnh) says is that we don't know how to feel peace. We don't understand the joy that is peace. We think that it's boring. And that is an aesthetic and a social perception. He is dealing with many of these same problems we are facing, and I just know he has some answers. (1991)"

"There is a refusal to understand that an American can look like one of us and doesn't have to be white. (1989)"

"I am looking for a language of peace. I am trying to rewrite a book of peace. And so maybe that is fighting for the soul, not just of Chinese American people, but the human soul. I want the human soul to be one where people care for one another and where people cherish and nourish and value one another, and I am trying to think of ways of conflict resolution that have to do with talking or hugging or something, whereas his idea of conflict resolution is to kill each other. (1991)"

"While I love young people, I like to talk to people my own age. I feel very lucky when we get together and there are middle-aged people and they still have their art, their writing, their acting. That's exciting. Like there is still life and the business of time and taking that away from them has not stopped them from being youthful."

"I hope when artists write new characters, we invent new archetypes and they are visions of ways that we can be...What we need to do is to be able to imagine the possibility of a playful, peaceful, nurturing, mothering man, and we need to imagine the possibilities of a powerful, nonviolent woman and the possibilities of harmonious communities and if we can just imagine them, that would be the first step toward building them and becoming them. (1990)"

"I feel so bad sometimes thinking of this great oral tradition, and along comes somebody like me who writes it down. People go to the library and pull out a book and say, "Here's the authentic story." It's not! That was only the odd person who came along, like Homer, and wrote it down. It's the same thing with the Chinese. Most of the tradition was oral and then someone came along and wrote it down."

"it's like a habit. I have to eat, I have to breathe, I have to write."

"("A friend once described Woman Warrior as convoluted.") MHK: Oh, I'm very proud of being convoluted. I try to be convoluted. Life is convoluted. I know there are some people who have a certain expectation of a linear kind of story where everything is explained to them and it goes at a slower pace and it's more of an accessible, popular kind of writing style. If they expect that, then they can't get into a more complicated book. I think that people like that miss out on something because they are not willing to work harder."

"part of the tension in my writing is that the oral tradition is very different from the written, and I see the oral tradition as being very alive, very immediate. It has the impact of command; it has the impact of directly influencing action. Also the oral stories change. A story changes from telling to telling. It changes according to the needs of the listener, according to the needs of the day, according to the interest of the time, and the story can be different from day to day. So what happens when you write it down? Writing is so static. The story will remain as printed for the next two hundred years and it's not going to change. That really bothers me, because what would really be neat would be for the words to change on the page every time, but they can't. So the way I tried to solve this problem was to keep ambiguity in the writing all the time."

"You go into the subconscious by not writing and then you make it normal consciousness by writing. Then you rewrite until you are working almost mechanically: the grammar and the structure all mental and rational. But now comes the time for not doing any writing. I mean to get far into the subconscious, where there are not word sequences."

"I want to write about something you can't find in research. Research can only, oh, I guess, confirm some of the small details, like what kinds of clothes these people wore and you can see the big historical things that happened. But what I want to say, I can't find through research. There's a feeling that I have, or there are feelings, the way people are in certain circumstances. I feel that it comes from the heightened moments in all our lives when we are really aware of what it feels like to be a person or what life is all about. You don't feel it too often, but every once in awhile you feel it. I want to put that feeling into writing or I want to write words so that when somebody reads it, they can have that feeling. And all the details are only components to get to this feeling. It's sort of a heightened awareness so that you know what it means to be human."

"it takes a whole life to organize and demonstrate and it takes another whole life to get writing done. The problem is making the day stretch from one point to another."

"The only way to get any work done-without polling everybody, as in a statistical study in sociology-is to give your own peculiar vision; because that's what's interesting, the way one person sees the world. It's up to other people to ask themselves whether they think like that or not. And if they don't think like you, that should be very exciting to them. They would read about something that they are completely unfamiliar with... I was just in Hong Kong and I loved seeing Chinese who were different from myself. To think of the possibility of another way of being Chinese or being a human being is much more exciting than to see someone just like me."

"When I write I also claim America in a literary way, in an artistic way. When people claim countries, it's usually thought of as conquering them in war. I'm claiming America in a pacifist way, in an artistic way."

"I was really shocked when I came out with my first book. At that time there were some Asian American men who were all we had of our literary community. And I expected, when my book came out, for them to say, welcome. Welcome to the community of artists. Because there are so few of us. So here's another one to add strength to our numbers. And, instead, the men just right away went into this big thing. It's a very crazy plot they have in their heads. Their assessment of the publishing industry is so wrong. (1989)"

"I cultivate my Chinese garden in the middle of an American town…I love China with all my heart and soul, although I feel fortunate to have escaped it."

"I feel that everyone has a blurred area, which is a border between their imagination and what actually happens, and I am very interested in that border."

"a lot of Chinese Americans get mad, because they say my experience is nothing like theirs. Of course, they may come from a different class of people; they come from a different generation of migration; they're a different generation American. There aren't enough books out there. If there were lots of books, then you could see the variety of people in the books, reflecting the variety of people in life. But since there aren't a whole lot of books... (1989)"

"I think that in order to recognize a warm-hearted human being, you have to be a warm-hearted human being yourself."

"One of the wonderful things about the 1960s was language. There was a new language and there were wonderful new ways of describing psychedelic states, spiritual states, trying to find new words for political actions like those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. What do you call that when you sit at the lunch counter and you don't move and you do it with peace and love?"

"I do believe that if we study any one discipline deeply, it will connect us to everything else."

"(Q: "will that be your major goal-to achieve peace?") Yes, yes-to put out into the world a vision of peaceful living and of how human beings can relate to one another harmoniously and joyfully and how groups of people come together. I feel that peace has hardly been imagined. It is rarely dramatized in the theater, in the movies, even in books."

"I don't want to regurgitate. Writing should be constantly an act of creation and going forward into the new."

"(Q: "In your Book of Peace, what would you be claiming?") Oh, what would I be claiming this time? What I would like to do is claim evolution that we can evolve past being a warring species into a peaceful species so that we are not predators anymore, and that we stop being carnivorous. If only we could stop being cannibals-"

"I've spent too many years carrying writing as if it were a burden that's only mine. I want to tell everybody, and young people too, that there are many things that we must do in community. I wish I had started sooner."

"remembrance and that happiness are mourning, too, transformed."

"If we imagine characters, can we cause them to appear in the real world? What if I could strongly write peace, I can cause an end to war."

"I do believe that our lives and our art go together. Who I am and what I write are the same...I feel that the writing process doesn't just begin when you are putting words on paper. It begins in the living that you do before, and I feel powerful enough now so that I can set up my daily living circumstances in order to support me and support my art."

"The way I've looked at it is that I want to write about myself and other people in the truest way possible. To write a true autobiography or biography, I have to know what the other person dreams and how her imagination works. I am less interested in dates and facts."

"All during the Vietnam War, I could feel there was a darkness hanging over the whole world and it lasted for so long."

"I think that if a person doesn't read, maybe they cannot come out of themselves. You know you delineated a. . .I think a growth process of human development. . .first there is an awareness of the ego, the self, and then of another and many others to become a communal person. And we need to go even beyond that our family, tribe, Chinatown, gang, nation-into a larger selflessness or agape. I think it is a very rare person who will take on public and global responsibilities... Reading and writing should expand and transform the self...must be an essential tool for envisioning and making the world."